Effect of control frequency on the performance of manufacturing systems with controllable production rates

Flow-line manufacturing systems represent the most prevalent process structure in industry for the repetitive production of discrete items. Machine breakdowns, however, limit their reliability and efficiency. The control of flow-line manufacturing systems, as a way to compensate for limited reliability, is about the frequent regeneration of production parameters so that the system output conforms to demand requirements in an acceptable manner. The influence of such regeneration frequency -or control frequency- on the system performance as well as its relevance with respect to other control parameters is, nevertheless, currently not well understood. So far, a continuous control action has been widely assumed in the performance analysis of unreliable manufacturing systems. This assumption follows naturally, given that most of the research work on shop floor control has been focused on job shop environments, such as flexible manufacturing systems. The reason for this emphasis on job shop environments could be the lack of flexibility in production rate of traditional repetitive manufacturing systems. This research work, on the other hand, was motivated by the realization that flow-line repetitive manufacturing systems can be designed for short term production rate control. Current implementations of lean manufacturing are cases of such systems.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Castañeda Vega, José Israel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David S. Cochran.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8696

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8696